Online chatters are among the heaviest Internet users mainly because online chatting is one of the fastest ways to connect to anyone from anywhere on the planet.

During those times without online chat, we relied more on snail mail and international phone call to communicate with our relatives, friends and loved ones who are far away from us. Snail mail takes a couple of days to reach its recipient while international phone call is quite expensive.

Nowadays, email and online chatting are commonly used to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime than those traditional methods. An email can be sent and received in a few minutes while online chatting provides you an instant connection with your chat mate. They are also far less expensive than traditional methods.

There are different companies that offer free online messaging and one of them that I personally use is Yahoo! Messenger. Some of its features are text-based chat and, photo and file sharing. You can also see each other on video using web cam and even talk to each other live for free through its online call feature, just make sure you have a microphone and speakers connected to your computer.

Apart from regular text-based chat, a great way to express your moods and feelings is by using its emoticons feature.

Emoticon is a textual face representing moods or facial expressions. The word came from blending the English words emotion (or emote) and icon. Examples of widely known emoticons are the smiley face 🙂 and the frowny face :(. The image below shows the default emoticon smileys on Yahoo! Messenger.

Yahoo! Messenger already has a default set of emoticons installed but if you want to surprise your chat mate with emoticons not included on the default list, then use Yahoo! Messenger’s hidden emoticons. Where can you find and how can you use this hidden emoticons? Here are two ways;

Method 2: Plug-In Method

If you don’t want the hassle of going to the Yahoo! Messenger’s hidden emoticons page every time you chat online, you can install a plug-in in your Yahoo! Messenger.

Before logging-in your Yahoo! Messenger account, download the YEmotePLUS plug-in here and install it in your computer (this is a third party plug-in not associated with Yahoo! so make sure you have an anti-virus software installed in your computer before installing this plug-in to protect your system just in case).

After installation, log-in your YM account and open an instant message conversation window with any of your contact.

Click ‘Actions’ on the Menu Bar then select, ‘Choose a Plugin…’ (Plugins Manager window will be shown).

Choose YEmotePLUS by clicking its ‘Start’ button.

An additional box is now added and accessible on your instant message conversation window containing the ‘Secret/Hidden’ emoticons.

Just do steps two (2) to five (5) again if you want to use the secret/hidden emoticons for your other chat mates.

There are some hidden emoticons that are not included in this plug-in. Can you guess what they are? As of now, there two (2), the “bee” and “transformer”. These are new emoticons added on the recent version of Yahoo! Messenger. You can use them by doing Method 1. Note that “transformer” can only be used on Yahoo! Messenger for Web.

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